Joseph Frank
A METAPHYSIC OF MODERN ART*
Art is not a submission; it is a conquest.
-From a speech by Andre Malraux.
The title of Andre Malraux's new book,
The Psychology of Art,
is apt to prove misleading to prospective readers. One could easily mis–
take the work for another of those elaborate treatises in so-called
scientific psychology, whose laboratory experiments, at least when ap–
plied to the fine arts, have led to such distressingly meager and ele–
mentary results. Malraux, however, uses the term "psychology" in a
much wider sense not customary in English. For him, the psychology
of art is an attempt to define the general structure of the artistic res–
ponse toward reality, and more particularly, toward the eternal human
reality of destiny and death. Art, Malraux believes, is a mighty answer
given by man to the menace of destiny; an answer flung back at fate
from the cave men to Picasso, but which has reached full self-con–
sciousness only in modern art. Here, for the first time, the eternal
metaphysical value of art is revealed in full clarity; and the purpose
of Malraux's book, which should perhaps have been called a metaphysic
rather than a psychology of art, is to exalt art's newly perceived status
as "a re-creation of the universe in the face of Creation."*·lE- In this res–
pect, Malraux carries to an extreme point the tendency of modern culture
to tum art into a secular religion-the religion of those for whom, as
for Nietzsche, God is dead, but who cannot stop asking the questions that
God once answered.
As French critics have noted, Malraux's
Psychology of Art
bears
more than a slight resemblance to Nietzsche's
Birth of Tragedy.
Both
books take their departure from some contemporary aesthetic phen–
omenon that seems to offer a new insight into the universal meaning
of art (for Nietzsche this contemporary stimulus was Wagner's music
drama, while for Malraux it is the aesthetic of Post-Impressionism);
both are written with coruscating verbal brilliance, and with a frenetic
*
Psychology of Art.
By Andre Malraux. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. Two
vols. 220 illustrations. $25.00.
**
All quotations from Malraux in this essay are in my translation, as the
essay was written before the appearance in English of
La Psychologie de L'Art.
J.
F.
